News

Scientific and medical publisher Karger Publishers continues to work actively toward a transition to Open Access (OA), including plans to ‘flip’, or convert, more journals from the subscription model to OA. By January 2020, five Karger journals have already become OA: Lifestyle Genomics, Gastrointestinal Tumors, Liver Cancer, Inflammatory Intestinal Diseases, and Kidney Diseases, increasing the number of Karger Publisher’s OA publications to 30 out of more than 100 journals.

Recently, Karger Publishers has reached several transformative OA agreements. In the Czech Republic, Karger Publishers secured its first Eastern European publish-and-access deal with two members of the Czech library consortium ELib: Masarykova Univerzita (Masaryk University) and Univerzita Karlova (Charles University). This includes both access to all Karger e-journals and the option for all researchers affiliated with the two institutes to publish OA in Karger journals at no additional cost. Another agreement with a German consortium also enables affiliated authors to access all Karger e-journals and publish OA in Karger subscription journals at no additional cost. 15 German universities have already taken up the publish-and-access offer. Karger Publishers provides a similar model to the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries (CSAL). Four Swiss universities have joined the publish and-access deal so far. Connecting and Advancing Health Sciences Karger is open to reaching further innovative deals with consortia partners that increase the share of OA content worldwide.

In addition to flipping a growing number of journals to OA and concluding OA agreements, Karger Publishers has introduced a discount and waiver policy for OA journals based on country income. The offer allows authors from low- to middle income countries to publish free of charge or with a discount on Article Processing Charges (APCs). This follows the launch in 2019 of a progressive policy regarding preprint publication. Furthermore, Karger Publishers has established new workflow measures and steps to ensure that authors can easily find information and take advantage of their institutions’ agreements, which give them the opportunity to publish OA articles at no extra cost. This makes publishing OA easy for authors and the libraries that support them.

For the coming year, Karger Publishers is already actively working to advance the transition to OA further by flipping several journals in 2021 and more in the following years, and by evaluating additional ‘open’ policies and services.

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